Hot answers tagged licensing
11
How would one enforce such a license?
Would you prohibit any military use? If the software checks air pressure in tires, and someone decides to use it on a military Hummer, is that a prohibited use? Can people in the military industrial complex use it to plan their monthly picnic?
Would it be an acceptable use if the software improved ballistic missile ...
8
Not quite.
Here's the basic idea. As you pointed out, "you can incorporate the software into your proprietary project, but that portion must remain open" under the MIT license. If you have 100 features in your proprietary product, and one of them is based on MIT-licensed code, that's fine.
However, if you have 100 features in your product, and one of them ...
6
Either it's open, or it's not. If the skin is restricted to "just your project", then it is, by definition, not open. If, then, your project were to include this skin, by extension it wouldn't be open either.
You have two options:
a) Go with a proprietary but free-as-in-beer license. One that allows people to use the software, but not redistribute in ...
6
The AGPL has a clause in it that specifically closes the loophole of the application (because it is a web application) not actually being distributed. All users are granted access to all of the application's source code.
However, if you can demonstrate that
iText is not required for your application to function, but merely adds an additional feature to ...
5
You cannot be sure of anything, but at least the Mono Project seems to think it's not a risk.
From their FAQ on licensing:
Could patents be used to completely disable Mono?
No. For a more nuanced response, see the next question.
The following items on the FAQ detail their license coverage, how Mono works around patents, and whether there are Free ...
5
Technically, you are not obliged to license your code at all: the default situation is that you as the author of the work are the copyright holder, and unless you give permission, nobody has any rights to your code.
Permission can be implied, e.g. if you send someone an e-mail with your code attached, that says, "here, please take this code, install it on ...
5
The GPL is considered viral because, if you combine software that is licensed under it with proprietary code, you must also open-source your proprietary code under the GPL in order to remain compliant with the GPL.
The MIT license doesn't say that at all.
I think you might be interpreting the term "The Software" to include your proprietary portion. It ...
5
Short answer: Ideas, yes. Source code, no.
The source code is protected by copyright and the license only allows you to use the source code if you license the result as GPL. This doesn't block you from selling the result, but requires you to provide the source code to anyone you have sold the application to (and stops you from barring them passing the ...
4
It's actually a very simple license, worth reading with due respect. If you can ask the question in English, I'm very sure you can comprehend the license - just try once again, without distractions.
In short, you can (section 3) IF you follow the rules (section 4 through 9). If you don't follow, then you are in violation.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and ...
4
If the bugfix is really trivial, then it likely isn't copyrightable at all, especially if there really isn't any other way to write the code. There are hundreds of millions of ways of writing a love poem or a video game, there really aren't more than one or two ways to write if (*p == NULL). Copyright is on the expression of an idea, so if there isn't ...
4
First of: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, consult a real lawyer before proceeding.
That would depend on the license of the third-party code. Also, you will have to choose a license that allows linking to a proprietary libs. Consult the company from which you got the library - and a lawyer.
You can release your code under as many different ...
4
Can't I just say "You're free to use this code in whatever way you need"?
That's a license, and yes, you do need one. Otherwise, a substantial portion of people who might want to use your code won't use it, because they don't have explicit permission.
Public Domain software has the same problem; there's no statement granting explicit rights to use ...
4
The GPL is a heavily viral license. If you use GPL code in your program at all, the entire codebase has to be compatible with the GPL.
If the library in question is available as both GPL and LGPL, you can link to it dynamically (as an external DLL/SO/dylib/whatever) without being in violation of the LGPL. If not, you need to look for another library, or a ...
3
This may not be directly answering your question, but it seems like you're looking for the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license. This allows for users to share and modify the work, under these conditions:
They must attribute their work to you.
They may not use it for any commercial purposes.
3
Apache license is a non-copyleft open-source license that does not require anything from you. You can use code covered by Apache version 2 license for anything you want.
The GPL alternative is there to permit combining the work with code covered by GPL version 2, because Apache version 2 license by itself is only compatible with GPL version 3.
Note that ...
3
The most important difference is that, with the GPL, your entire application must be licensed under the GPL, not just parts of it. This has the effect of requiring your entire application to be open-sourced, effectively preventing any GPL licensed component from being used in a closed-source, commercial application.
3
The short version is: GPL is "viral" (ie: any code linked to GPL code and subsequently distributed must also be made GPL) and MIT is not. In that sense, the GPL is more restrictive than the MIT license.
The GPL effectively forces your code, and any code that uses it, to always be free. Code that has the MIT license can be used and distributed in ...
3
Your best option is to politely refuse the offer. IMO.
Is there a license that would fit this requirement?
None that I'm aware of. Or at least not one of the common ones. Of course, you could talk to a lawyer and draft a license expressly for this purpose. But you are likely to get heat from various quarters for doing it.
Surely it is not worth it ...
2
If I create a project, should I add the name of every single contributor in LICENSE?
You should add name of every copyright holder. Trivial changes cannot be copyrighted, so that makes it only the significant contributors.
I am used to slightly more complex layout though. File COPYING gives the license text and file AUTHORS gives the list of ...
2
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency can provide this service as a side effect of the currency bookkeeping method (the blockchain; a P2P shared ledger that's cryptographically signed).
Take a hash of your code at a given point in time (use some sort of version-control software to ensure you can get back to that point), and use a utility like BitcoinTimestamp to embed ...
2
How exactly is the community benefiting from doing work to extend a product they can only get by buying it from you?
The only way I can see this working is a joint commercial/(L)GPL version. However even then you would need to get developers to assign any changes to you if you wanted to use it in the commercial version
2
IANAL but from what I understand it's compatible in the sense that you can use Apache licensed code under the GPL, not the other way around.
So if the code was licensed under the Apache license, you can use it in a GPL licensed application. If the code was licensed under the GPL, any derivative work must be also under the GPL and cannot, without the ...
2
I found this explicitly non-military license for an encryption algorithm called OCB.
2.1 License.
Subject to your compliance with the terms of this license, including the restrictions set forth in Section 2.2, Licensor hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicenseable, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable ...
2
There are three licenses for sub-components of the MorphAdorner library that might restrict its use in your application.
The Gate and NGramJ libraries (contained in MorphAdorner) use the LGPL license. The LGPL effectively requires that it must be possible for a user of your application to replace those libraries (and possibly the MorphAdorner library, ...
1
No. You can't. That's a violation of the GPL and one can be sued for distributing software that uses the GPL'd library without making the source code of said library publicly available. The code that was freely given to the world came with the string that if you use it in a project, you have to freely give the project away. This is not the MIT or BSD open ...
1
From a coding perspective, try your best to segregate and encapsulate the Apache parts.
From a license perspective, I would just note in the About screen "Some aspects of the $myproduct codebase covered under the Apache license" or something like that. You don't need to specify which pieces, unless there's a specific, named algorithm that you're borrowing,
...
1
Yes, the BSD license allows you to directly incorporate the (new version of the) Qt Solutions component in your closed-source application. There is no need to go the route of using it via a shared library.
Note that the new license only applies to new versions. You got your current version under the LGPL license, so as long as you use that version, you are ...
1
The compatibility of the two licenses means that it is possible to release code under a dual license of both GPLv3 and Apache Licence 2.0.
The thing with the GPL license is that it requires that if a single line of your application is licensed with it, then all of the application must be made available under the GPL license, even if that first line is ...
1
I have had to deal with a similar situation, and this is how I solved it:
At the top of my file, I did not put the standard copyright notice, but rather a notice that the function contained held different copyrights.
Preceding each function implementation, I put a copyright notice pertaining to that function.
In my case, there were only a handful of ...
1
I would include a file like "LICENSE_CodeFile_Function.txt", and then as a comment above the function, include an attribution, ie "This function is from ..... and is Copyright (c) 2004-2013 James Smith... please see the license ....."
In general, as long as you include the license in your distribution, and are very clear about where you got the code from, ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
