Licensing the Test Suite: The Open Group License

Licensing the Test Suite: The Open Group License

The Open Group is a standards organization that promotes, among other things, standards relating to UNIX. It also owns the UNIX certification mark that is registered around the world, and it manages a program to certify UNIX implementations by other companies. Versions of UNIX that meet the Open Group's specifications may carry the UNIX certification mark.

Certification requires testing. Under trademark law in most countries , the certifying organization must ensure that its certification marks are used only on tested and approved products. Otherwise the certification mark may be lost. A certifying organization (e.g., The Open Group) is responsible for verifying the quality of the certified goods.

The Open Group does this through published test suites, programs that are used to test versions of UNIX. If the test suites run successfully on the to-be-certified UNIX implementation, that UNIX version is certified.

The Open Group Test Suite License is for the test suite software itself, the Package. (See www.opensource.org for a copy of this license.) That Package is open source. The license does not require that the UNIX implementations that are tested against that Package themselves be open source.

The Open Group Test Suite License seeks to control the copyrightable elements of the test suite software sufficiently to protect the Open Group's certification marks. The preamble to the license calls it "artistic control" but this license actually has a much more practical objective. The Open Group is primarily concerned with the importance of testing to ensure conformance to the standards:

Since these are benchmark measures of conformance, we feel the integrity of test tools is of importance. In order to preserve the integrity of the existing conformance modes of this test package and to permit recipients of modified versions of this package to run the original test modes, this license requires that the original test modes be preserved. (Open Group Test Suite License Preamble.)

This license conforms to the Open Source Principles. Li-censees may copy, modify, and distribute copies of the Package. These are the important conditions:

• You must duplicate all of the original copyright notices and associated disclaimers from the Standard Version of this Package. (Open Group Test Suite License section 1.)

• You must insert a prominent notice in each changed file stating how and when you changed that file. (Open Group Test Suite License section 3.)

• You must rename any nonstandard executables and test cases and provide a separate manual page that clearly documents how it differs from the Standard Version. (Open Group Test Suite License section 3.)

• When you distribute your version, you must accompany your modifications with their corresponding Standard Version executables and test cases. (Open Group Test Suite License section 4.)

Through this open source license on its test suite Package, The Open Group is able to control the standards for its own certification mark while granting to everyone the software freedom to create derivative works of the Package. Those derivative works are not required to comply with the standard, but if they do not they cannot be called the Standard Version :

"Standard Version" refers to such a Package if it has not been modified, or has been modified in accordance with the wishes of the Copyright Holder. (Open Group Test Suite License Definitions.)

Only those UNIX implementations that successfully past the Standard Version tests will be certified by the Open Group to call themselves UNIX.