Intellectual Property Policy

This page answers common legal questions related to AMQP and the AMQP Working Group.

What is the AMQP License?

The AMQP License forms a part of the AMQP Specification which you can download, and is intended to grant a broad set of rights to encourage the proliferation of AMQP.

The AMQP Working Group is committed to making AMQP technology widely available, the AMQP License contains specific provisions to give you the unambiguous right to implement, as provided by the following key excerpts:

The Authors each hereby grants to you a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, non-transferable, nonexclusive license to (i) copy, display, distribute and implement the Advanced Messaging Queue Protocol ("AMQP") Specification and (ii) the Licensed Claims that are held by the Authors, all for the purpose of implementing the Advanced Messaging Queue Protocol Specification.

"Licensed Claims" means those claims of a patent or patent application, throughout the world, excluding design patents and design registrations, owned or controlled, or that can be sublicensed without fee and in compliance with the requirements of this Agreement, by an Author or its affiliates now or at any future time and which would necessarily be infringed by implementation of the Advanced Messaging Queue Protocol Specification.

The License is attached to the AMQP Specification itself.
You get the rights when you download it!

Copyright License

The AMQP Specification itself is just text, protected by copyright. The AMQP License is meant to encourage widespread copying, distribution and implementation. However, we do not permit any action which would change the meaning of the AMQP Specification since we want to prevent uncontrolled forking of it.

Patents

Implementing the AMQP Specification might infringe patents. The members of the AMQP Working group, in order to encourage widespread implementation and use of AMQP, have agreed to provide a royalty-free patent license to implementers of AMQP on the terms set forth in the AMQP License.

Third Party Patents

It is possible that there are others, who are not in the AMQP Working Group, who hold patents in this area. The AMQP Working Group cannot grant you rights in third-party patents, but we have included terms in the AMQP License intended to discourage litigation by AMQP users against other AMQP users with respect to implementations of the AMQP protocol.

There seem to be several licenses on the subdomains of amqp.org, why?

• All content on http://www.amqp.org or http://jira.amqp.org is covered by the Terms of Use unless it is specifically identified as being covered under another license such as the AMQP License.
• The formal AMQP Specification is published under the AMQP License. This license is reserved for technology and specifications formally voted upon by the AMQP Working Group because it licenses technology patents to implementers and users.
• The sister community website, http://wiki.amqp.org, is a less formal community website where third parties who want to offer technologies for consideration in future versions of AMQP can do so. We are tidying up the sister site and clarifying the community website role, branding and licensing.

Can I implement AMQP commercially, as open source, in hardware, etc?

Yes. We encourage both commercial and open source implementations of AMQP, in software, hardware or embedded in other services and solutions. We encourage distribution of implementations in source or binary forms and we encourage the bundling and distribution of AMQP as part of operating systems and other infrastructure. The AMQP License enables this.

Can I use the AMQP XML files to generate code; can I ship those as part of the source code?

Some of the AMQP Specification is in the form of XML, and is designed to be used to assist the creation of implementations.

For the avoidance of doubt, we encourage people to copy, excerpt and distribute the XML as needed to make it usable in your chosen implementation technology.  If you are shipping source code as part of an open source distribution or if your implementation uses the XML at runtime, that is also encouraged.

What kind of entity is the AMQP Working Group?

The AMQP Working Group is not a legal entity; it is a collection of companies held together by mutual contracts for the purpose of creating AMQP. Our ultimate aim is to hand the standard over to a more formal standards group.

What standards body will you ultimately hand AMQP over to and when?

This is a topic which is under active discussion in the Working Group. The transition will not be sooner than the finalisation of AMQP 1.0.