Sun's legal division must have been pretty busy lately, churning out not one, but three licenses in the shortest period of time: the CDDL, which may be used for the upcoming OpenSolaris code, the JDL and the latest newest 'Read-Only" license.
Being a Java developer, I'll kindly let others have a go at dissecting the CDDL, while I turn my attention to the JDL and the "Read-only" license.
The JDL, or 'Java Distribution License', seems to have been made with commercial distibutors in mind, as it bundles the TCK and the RI under one inseparable entity, and effectively prohibts open source implementations of the specification once one accepts the JDL. It has the usual problems of the Java Research License (JRL), including the overreaching definition of modifications, and commercial use. The gradual improvement vs. the JRL is that this license means one gets the TCK, and may even use the RI commercially, within certian limits. I won't go into the details here, as every project adopting the JDL seems to end up having its own version of it, and these may differ. Not really that interesting, as baby steps towards a more open licensing of Java technology go.
The Read-only license is, on the other hand, the funniest license I've come accross in the last couple of weeks. It's the codification of 'look, but don't touch' into a simple, straightforward license agreement. It is a software license agreement that does not allow you to use the software. It is a source code license agreement that prohibits compiling the source code, or executing it in any way.
"Read-only" license sounds less ambiguous than 'Shared Source', or similar marketing labels usually applied to pseudo-open software. That's actually quite cool, as many closed license these days come with pretty bombastic names that don't even remotely mean what they say. Also cool is Sun for the first time, ever, licensing their TCK under a zero cost license, and addressing tainting of developers that have had the pleasure to read, only such source code.
Nevertheless, the license is pretty absurd. Beside all the cheap shots one could make advising Sun to upgrade to a "Delete-only" license, one thing is particularly absurd: the clause for confidentiality. Let alone that test suites in general are not superb alien technology from the future, but just a series of simple, boring pieces of code to execute a method, or two, and evaluate the results according to what a spec says, and the specs being tested are supposed to be open standards, what sort of a confidential secret could one obtain by reading, only, through test suite code?
On the positive side, beside the license being pretty absurd and rather useless, I don't have much to complain about, which is a major progress from the usual license agreements surrounding Java technology. That's quite a bit of progress, I guess.