Azul understands the protection of your intellectual property (IP) is critically important when choosing an open source offering, and you can rest assured knowing that your IP is protected when using Zulu. As a customer of Zulu Enterprise or Zulu Embedded, you may have access to specific builds of Zulu® OpenJDK which have undergone formal certification and verification to ensure that including, embedding and/or distributing Zulu in your products does not contaminate your products’ IP or code with license requirements (including but not limited to the source code disclosure requirements of GPLv2).
Every commercial Zulu binary is 100% open source, but importantly many builds are also verified to ensure non-contamination. Through the use of specifically developed tools and analysis techniques, Azul scans and analyzes the more than 7 million lines of OpenJDK sources and the full set of build artifacts and object materials that are produced from the OpenJDK sources, including intermediate and dynamically-generated source files. This analysis covers all topological paths and relationships between any code that might run on the resulting Zulu build and all internal components. Azul verifies that the relationships between the multitude of open source and third-party licenses that exist in OpenJDK used by Zulu and any code that may run on Zulu will not result in contamination, and do not impose any requirements or restrictions on licensing of the code that runs on the Zulu JDK or JRE.
Our license verification processes and tools ensure that your Java code is never contaminated by GPL or any other licenses that could require placing extra restrictions on the use or distribution of your code, forced sharing of your code under some specific terms, or mandate the purchase of additional third-party licenses.
We understand how important avoiding license contamination is for any business that sells or distributes software that contains open source components. Our Product Management and Legal teams can work with you and your organization to address your concerns fully, and explain the strength and rigor of our processes and our guarantees. To get started, just drop a note to your Azul representative or contact Azul at [email protected].