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Legality of using IBM runtime or build JARs outside of WebSphere Studio, Rational Application Developer or WebSphere Application Servers

Question & Answer


Question

What is the legality of using IBM WebSphere runtime JAR such as jsf-ibm.jar outside of WebSphere Studio or on non WebSphere servers?

Cause

Clients with a WebSphere Studio v5.1.x license ask the following questions:

  1. Is it a problem to use jsf-ibm.jar library on another vendor's Application Server such as WebLogic or Oracle Application Server (OAS)?

  2. Can you re-distribute this library freely?

  3. Can this jar be used in another Integrated Development Environment (IDE) such as Eclipse or on other vendor IDE(s)?

Answer

You cannot use or distribute the jsf-ibm.jar on its own outside of the WebSphere Studio or Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software IDEs, or WebSphere Servers.

The jsf-ibm.jar was inadvertently left off the redistributable component list in the v5.1.2 license. The issue was corrected in Rational Application Developer v6. In the case of WebSphere Studio v5.1.x or Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software v6.x, what is put into your webcontent/lib folder is redistributable if it is part of the WAR file for the application being built. That is to say any WAR file built with Rational Application Developer is redistributable. The individual JAR files are not, by themselves, redistributable.

It cannot be used in another IDE because that would mean that you have unpacked the WAR file and it would no longer be the WAR file you had permission to redistribute. The JAR file would then be extracted and used elsewhere to build another application. This is not permitted. The same applies to using this JAR on other non-IBM J2EE servers.

The above statements apply to any IBM J2EE JARs and any associated J2EE project or module types. Support for such a module on a non-IBM J2EE server is discussed in a related technote (below).

Note: This information also applies in principle to Rational Application Developer v7.0/v7.5 and associated WebSphere Application Server v6.x/7.x server runtime JARs.

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Document Information

Modified date:
10 September 2020

UID

swg21199716

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