Licensing

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, the Apache license, or the BSD license. All these licenses are "non-viral": 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. (In the Java product this includes the ASM library for bytecode generation; in the .NET product it also includes the IKVMC and OpenJDK runtimes, the Apache Xerces parser, and the TagSoup HTML parser.) These are listed as Redistributed components

Also distributed with Saxon-HE is a JAR file, saxon9-unpack.jar, which contains proprietary Saxonica code (non-open-source) for executing a "packaged" stylesheet that has been prepared under Saxon-PE or Saxon-EE. For details of this feature see Packaged Stylesheets. This JAR file can be freely redistributed, but in all other respects, the terms and conditions published at http://www.saxonica.com/paid-license.pdf apply. If you do not want to accept these conditions, please delete this JAR file.

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 in most cases also used in Saxon-HE (the only open source code in Saxon-PE or Saxon-EE that is not also used in Saxon-HE is the ASM bytecode generation library). 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; but you are not required to publish the source code of your own application code.

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 as a component of a commercial application is possible under commercial terms; prices are published in the Saxonica online store.

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.