This section of the documentation provides information about Saxon licensing, including required notices for open-source components that have been incorporated into Saxon, and acknowledgments of contributors.
This documentation relates both to the open source Saxon-HE product and to the commercial products Saxon-PE and Saxon-EE. The conditions of use are of course different in the two cases.
The information in this section applies to both the Java and .NET versions of Saxon, unless otherwise specified.
Saxon-HE
The open-source Saxon-HE product is made available under the Mozilla Public License Version 1.0 (the "License"); you may not use the software except as permitted by the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/
The source code of Saxon-HE can be considered for licensing purpose as having three parts:
Category A consists of code which was written as part of Saxon either by the initial developer, or by another contributor. All such components are subject only to the MPL 1.0 license. A List of Contributors is provided, for information.
Category B code was originally
produced as part of some other product and subsequently incorporated (with varying degrees of modification) into Saxon
by way of source code integration. Many of these components have their own license conditions: these are in all cases
licenses similar in form to either the Mozilla Public License or the BSD license. All these licenses are "non-infectious":
they
permit the code to be combined into a commercial product without requiring the commercial code to become open source.
In some cases the license
conditions require the origin of the code to be acknowledged, typically by including a notice in all distributions of the
product. These notices are provided in the notices directory of the Saxon product as distributed,
and the documentation provides a table listing all these Third-party code components.
Category C code consists of components that are included unchanged in the Saxon distribution in binary form, for the convenience of users to avoid the need for a separate download. (There are no such components in the Java product; in the .NET product this category includes the IKVMC and OpenJDK runtimes and the Apache Xerces parser.) These are listed as Redistributed components
Saxon-EE and Saxon-PE
The Enterprise and Professional editions of Saxon are commercial products released under the terms and conditions published at http://www.saxonica.com/paid-license.pdf.
These products include the functionality of Saxon-HE as a subset. The source code for Saxon-PE and Saxon-EE can be considered to be in three parts:
Source code for which Saxonica Limited owns the copyright, which Saxonica has chosen to make available to the public under the Mozilla Public License (around 250K lines of code)
Source code for which Saxonica Limited owns the copyright, which Saxonica has chosen to retain as proprietary (around 90K lines of code)
Open source code developed and licensed by third parties and used by Saxonica under the terms of those licenses (around 20K lines of code)
The code in the third category is also used in Saxon-HE (that is: there is no open source code in Saxon-PE or Saxon-EE
that is not also used in Saxon-HE). In all cases the license under which the code was used permits the creation
of commercial products derived from this code, and does not "infect" such products with open source obligations.
In many cases the relevant license requires a notice to be published; this is satisfied by inclusion of the relevant notices
in this docoumentation and also in the notices directory of the issued product. In many cases the relevant
license also requires any modifications to source code to be published; this is satisfied by issuing the source code of
Saxon-HE, which includes all such modifications.
The Saxon SQL extension
The Saxon SQL extension is available as an open-source plug-in to Saxon-PE or Saxon-EE. It will not run with Saxon-HE because it relies on XSLT element extensibility, a feature not available in Saxon-HE. However, the code of the SQL extension itself is open-source and is issued under the Mozilla Public License, meaning that you are free to extend it and customize it to your needs, even though it requires Saxon-PE or Saxon-EE to run.
EXSLT extensions
A substantial number of extension functions defined in EXSLT are available as an open-source plug-in to Saxon-PE or Saxon-EE. These are implemented as reflexive extension functions, and therefore rely on a mechanism not available in Saxon-HE. However, the code of the these extension functions itself is open-source and is issued under the Mozilla Public License, meaning that you are free to extend it and customize it to your needs, even though it requires Saxon-PE or Saxon-EE to run.
Redistribution
Redistribution of Saxon-HE is freely permitted under the terms of the Mozilla Public License. Note that this requires inclusion of all the necessary notices. If any source code changes are made, the license requires that they be published.
If you produce a product that includes or requires Saxon-HE, please refer to it prominently as "The Saxon XSLT and XQuery Processor from Saxonica Limited", and include the URL of the home page, which is at http://www.saxonica.com/. As a courtesy, please take reasonable steps to ensure that your users know that they are running Saxon.
Redistribution of Saxon-PE or Saxon-EE is possible only under commercial terms that are subject to negotiation. Please contact Saxonica for information. Pricing will typically be based on an annual fee, calculated according to the expected number of copies to be shipped and an assessment of the proportion of revenue that can be attributed to the value added by including Saxon in the solution.
Technical Support (Saxon-HE)
Software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" basis, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing rights and limitations under the License.
There is no guarantee of technical support, though we are usually able to answer enquiries within a few days. Please subscribe to the mailing list available at http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/saxon-help and raise any enquiries there; or use the saxon-help forum, also available on the SourceForge pages. Also check the Saxon project pages on SourceForge for details of known errors; all bugs are listed there as soon as there is sufficient evidence to describe the nature of the problem.
Please do not enter suspected bugs directly into the "bugs" tracker on SourceForge. We prefer to keep that for confirmed bugs only, so that it is easier to search for known bugs.
