Does the STS licensing allow redistributing internally?

[ptorkko]

I'm compiling a package of tools for the developers at the company I work for.

Other parts of the package are trivial, but STS is not. It looks like at least parts of STS are available under the Eclipse license, which should allow this, but what about vfabric tcserver which is also included?

So, can STS be included as is as a part of an internal tarball containing other tools?

[Martin Lippert]

Hey!

I am not a lawyer and therefore I cannot provide any legal advice here. But the STS distribution contains all the necessary and detailed licensing information:

- The Spring Tool Suite itself (the IDE) is open-source and licensed under EPL (so that shouldn't be a problem).
- tc Server Developer Edition is not open-source and comes under a specific EULA, that you can find in the "licenses" directory of the tc Server Developer Edition installation. You should take a look at that EULA in case you want to re-distribute tc Server Developer Edition within your company among your developers.

I think you should discuss your use-case with your legal department regarding the tc Server Developer Edition EULA. I will also contact someone from the tc Server team to provide more advice in case of doubt.

HTH,
Martin

[ptorkko]

I've tried reading the license(s), but as a non native english speaker non-lawyer, they're really hard to interpret.

We could entirely leave tcserver out of the package (as we don't really use it), but does the license allow that ?

Eclipse + Spring IDE would work, but "preconfiguring" eclipse variants is hard due to the workspace containing some of the configuration, so I'd rather use an out of the box STS (with possibly tcserver removed).

[Martin Lippert]

Hey!

I perfectly understand that... And I am sorry for this licensing issue, tc Server Developer Edition is just not open-source...

The distribution bundle for STS contains STS itself, Apache Maven, Spring Roo, and tc Server Developer Edition. Each of those parts is licensed under its own license. So in case you leave tc Server out of your internal distribution, you don't need to worry about the special tc Server license anymore... :-)

Since the STS IDE is fully open-source, you can go ahead and re-distribute that within your company, of course. And the same applies to Spring Roo and Apache Maven.

HTH,
Martin